What if no one has power – not the CEO, the president, or the founder? What if it is actually not even possible to “have power”, and “power” is just a comforting illusion – and a dangerous one? Could it be that modern self-management – aiming to “distribute power” – remains in the same paradigm as the one that is leading us towards self-destruction?
At the root of our Western paradigm lies a belief: that we are separate individuals. From that belief stems another: that power can be held, as if it were an object, by individuals, and thus divorced from the context that enables it and the consequences it produces.
That belief may be comforting. It lets us imagine that someone is in charge. But it’s also an illusion, akin to conspiracy theories, where we comfort ourselves by assuming that someone is in charge.
But that doesn’t make it true.
This article is an invitation to look closer at how we think about power in organizations and in society. Following Donella Meadows’ insight that paradigms are changed by pointing to their distortions, I want to expose the cracks in our common ideas of power – especially in the Western world – and show that it doesn’t hold water. In fact, it never did.
To see the cracks in the paradigm, let’s look first at what power is not.
What power isn’t
Let’s first see how our concept of power is simply not true.
The first problem is that we, in English, think of something we have: “he has a lot of power.”
But what is power, and can we have it?
Let’s use a common definition of power, like the ability to move resources or affect our environment. If I have a lot of power, I can make people do all kinds of things, like clean my private jet.
Yet, this assumes simple causality. I hire you and pay you money, and therefore, you clean my private jet. Easy?
But simple causality is one of those invisible lies; it’s simply not true. To see that, we just need to ask, what are the other things that need to be in place to make the jet cleaning happen? First of all, I need to have a jet; someone must have built it, the materials for it need to exist, and I must have had the money to buy the jet. Why do I have the money? Maybe my parents had it, so there have been circumstances leading to that. Jets must have needed to be invented. People must have been born, fed, raised, and educated. You must have needed the money badly enough to work for me – lots and lots of circumstances to that.
It’s just as true to say that you “had to” clean my private jet because my parents had money, or because engineers invented turbines.
In the real world, outside of management classes, the entire world is interconnected. Every interaction is a culmination point of everything else, including millions of years of history.
Therefore, you don’t make me do anything. The sum of the entire context you and I are in makes it such that I will choose to clean the jet. In other words, you, without the entire context, have no power over me.
In the real world, everything is connected. In the real world, everything – the whole context – makes and breaks what you can do. Not the boss.
If we take interconnectedness seriously, we need to let go thought of simple causality.
So let’s look more closely: if our assumptions about power don’t hold up, what actually is power?
What power is
Let’s reconsider our concept of power in light of interconnectedness and see how this changes everything.
If simple causality isn’t a thing, then power can’t mean “someone can make things do things.” Our concept of power is built on an untrue foundation. That means our organizational systems that concentrate and hierarchize – or distribute – power are built on an untrue foundation, too.
I certainly don’t want to argue that power is just an illusion; that’s not fully right either. Because yes, of course, I see that some people have more resources, pull, or options than others.
For one, I don’t have a private jet. If I want to move my body somewhere, I need to buy a ticket, bike, or walk. My options for where I can spend the evening are heavily limited. That’s not true for people with a private jet.
Let’s play with a different way of thinking about power. If everything depends on everything else in the context to allow it, then “power” lives in the network of relationships that make certain actions possible. Relationships between muscle fibers contribute to physical strength, relationships between people contribute to what we call social power, etc.
A founder, for example, can move minds and resources and “make people do things” because of the relationships in the broader system and how the organization shapes and reads its organizational context (e.g., the bank only recognizes their signature, the inside and outside world gives special attention to “founders”). That means that power is in the patterns, not in the person.
So if we take that seriously, then what does it mean in an organization to “distribute power”? Power is already distributed all the time – into the whole entire universe!
What does it mean to “share power” or to “empower someone”? It only makes sense if we believe we had the power to begin with.
In truth, we can’t empower anyone. We can only reorganize the conditions so that more of what’s possible can unfold through them.
But it’s not just about the relationships but also about their configurations – how relationships are patterned. It’s like a riverbed carved over time: water flows more easily in certain directions, not because the water is powerful, but because of how the ground has been shaped.
We can think of power as potential in the system, like a special folding toy that can move this way but not that way. Each configuration has a certain wiggle room or leeway – configurations into which we can bend the system more easily than others, like in this toy:
People can find themselves in positions where patterns give more or less room. If you can’t apply for a job because it requires childcare and a car, but can’t get a car or childcare because you can’t afford it without a job, then you have less leeway. The patterns just don’t move that way easily. Something will snap if you try.
(This is close to what is often called “privileges”, a concept which expresses how access to potential differs. But privilege is again something we say an individual “has,” not what the context allows – still in the same simple causality/individual paradigm as the concept of “power.” Privilege is a placeholder word for structural affordances; it can’t be owned, just permitted. If the structure changes, so does the “privilege,” making it a relationship, not a trait.)
Power, action, and responsibility
Yet, here’s a piece we easily forget. The animation looks like it could move back and forth forever. But once we flex the toy, we also change all other relationships in the system.
Reality is more like IKEA furniture. If you click one piece into place, you will never be able to get it out. Each action (or inaction) changes the entire field, and once moved, everything else is changed. You’re in a new situation.
For example, let’s say someone lies but later admits their lie. Are we back to where we started? No. A tiny bit of trust “broke off.” An invisible connection between us is severed. The field remembers. It keeps the score.
Of course, if we screw up, we can tell ourselves that everything is like it used to be. That’s a story we might tell ourselves to avoid the weight of responsibility. And we can’t just say “but I apologized!” and wiggle our way out of responsibility for the impact of our actions.
When we think of power as something a person has, it becomes easy to detach action from responsibility, because the impact is outside of them. Power is separated from consequence. That’s how we arrive at phrases like “he used his power responsibly” or “she took responsibility,” as if these were voluntary, optional moves. You were never not responsible.
If we see power as potential in a relational and configurational (sub)context, then actor and impact are within the same field. They are and were never separate. We cannot even distinguish between “power” and responsibility. Power is the potential to twist the relational field into a new situation, so responsibility is not an add-on, but intrinsic to the act of twisting. There is no action without impact.
That also means it’s largely irrelevant what someone’s intention was. I don’t care whatsoever what your values or your purpose statement said. All that matters is: what does the world look like now that the actions have happened? Where has strain been added or relieved? Where have choices been reduced, where coherence increased? That’s a question about patterning in the real world.
Implications for organizational practice
What does this mean for organizations?
It takes time to repattern our thinking but here might be a beginning:
- The context is made of patterned relationships of all kinds – between people, things, concepts, ideas, memories, bodies, tissue, cells. (similar to ANT)
- Due to its configuration, this enormous web of relationships has the potential to move with more or less ease in certain nodes, like the toy.
- Any action changes the context, and obviously that means it changes the context for all of us.
For organizational practice, we are now in a bit of a bind: we know that all actions are permitted by the context – everything and everyone else. We also know that all actions impact everyone else. But how do we shape this into coordinated action?
We have to watch out not to slide back into positional and causal thinking here. (In my experience, one mentions the word “organization” and people’s minds are right back in the old paradigm!) Remember that it is not true that manager X can “have power”, therefore, it’s also impossible to “use that power” and “make a decision.” (I’ve already questioned the reality of decisions elsewhere.)
For that, it is irrelevant how we hold power: together or alone, granted or assumed. “Power” as a mental frame itself will always slide back towards separation because it, at its core, assumes separation of actor and context. It trains us to ask who gets to decide, instead of how the field is being shaped. So the goal is not to distribute power more evenly – that’s just rearranging chairs. We need to let go of the idea of power.
How can we be in organizations (structured collectives) in a way that is aligned with a truly interconnected, relational worldview? I think I have a sense of what that would look like, but the full picture takes more room to describe (there is more to come; follow for more).
The good news is that I think we’re closer than we think. Here are a few sketches.
- The first move is to see the context as the relational field as primary, not the isolated actor.
- While not separate, the relevant (sub)context of relationships makes the organization a web of even more densely interconnected actors.
- This set of relationships can “come to life” when it is structured enough to keep itself alive (autopoiesis). This requires certain organization-level affordances, like the ability to define a shared sense of direction and relevance (aka strategy).
- We may pragmatically develop agreements on who holds certain parts of the organization (what sociocracy calls domains). So “power” in this way means to only temporarily borrow from the whole and the collective enough to tend to a part: stewardship.
- Stewardship means to create conditions where people can sense what’s needed and act appropriately within boundaries so the whole thrives. (I call that context stewardship.)
- This “packaging” of permissioning cannot be divorced from action and impact, feedback, and multi-modal (more than just thinking and words) sensing and feedback.
I think the biggest shift needed is to cede our sense of wanting “power” and autonomy. We’re scared. When we’re scared, we hold on tighter. We look for answers, re-shuffles, or spin conspiracy theories. But I think it’s time to grow up and accept that it’s not about our egos and control, not about simple when-this-then-that.
Letting go of power as a concept means plunging into interconnectedness. Once we’re ready to do that, we are ready to become a part of the bigger whole – and meet both our deepest longing and our biggest fear.
Wiser organizations 